


Reunion

by MyOwnSuperintendent



Category: The Avengers (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 11:34:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7638508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyOwnSuperintendent/pseuds/MyOwnSuperintendent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After some years, Cathy sees Steed again--and things are both the same as and different from the way they were before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reunion

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own The Avengers or anything related to it. Hope you enjoy!

She’s been back in London for nearly a year when she picks up the phone to hear a familiar voice on the other end.  “Mrs. Gale!” Steed says, as smoothly as if they’d last seen each other mere days ago. 

“What on earth do you want?” she blurts out.  It’s not the most polite response, perhaps, but she certainly wasn’t expecting to hear from him out of the blue like this.

Steed laughs, though, seemingly entirely unoffended.  “How wonderful to hear your voice.”  He’d heard that she was in town again, he continues, and thought he’d give her a ring.  Would she like to have dinner together on Saturday?

Would she?  The last time she saw Steed, more than four years ago now, Cathy had decided that she was through with getting involved in his schemes.  Even so, she’d never denied—even to herself—that for all the times he’d frustrated her, they’d had plenty of pleasant times together as well.  She liked his company, even if she’d kept the two of them on Christmas card terms over the past few years.  If they have dinner together, she imagines he’ll make at least one comment that makes her want to roll her eyes, but the conversation will be on the whole enjoyable.  He’ll make her laugh, she thinks.  He always knows good restaurants, too.  And if he makes any sort of proposal that sounds even vaguely like a suspicious scheme, she’ll give the firmest possible no. 

Yes, she says, she would like that.

The restaurant is excellent, good food and better wine.  And it is very good to see him again—she is surprised just how good.  The years have changed him for the better, Cathy decides; he does make her laugh, as she imagined he would, but he doesn’t make her want to roll her eyes, and he doesn’t bring up anything that could be interpreted, in any light, as a scheme or a ploy or a trick.  Perhaps she’s changed too.  She still remembers why she walked away, doesn’t regret it for a moment, but it doesn’t seem as important now; she can’t be very upset about his half-truths or the dangers she had to face.  Not now, when they’re talking animatedly together, when she glances at the clock to find, to her surprise, that more than two hours have already passed.  For better or for worse, they were friends.  She’s glad to find that, after all, they can still be that.

Steed phones her again, later in the week, and they go to a concert; Cathy’s the one to phone him, the next time, to ask if he’d like to join her at a play she’s wanted to see.  They go for a drink, afterwards, and sit together talking.  There’s a part of Cathy that’s still on her guard—still making sure that she doesn’t get lured into any sort of life-threatening situation—but it dwindles with every meeting.  They are comfortable together, now. 

There’s one area in which Steed has always been straightforward, and that, at least, doesn’t seem to have changed.  They are coming out of a restaurant together, about a month after he first phoned her, and he says, “Well, Mrs. Gale, I could run you home.  Or you could come back to my flat, if you’d prefer.”

It’s a much easier decision than that about joining him for dinner.  When they worked together, the two of them were…she’s never sure what to call it.  Lovers implies a devotion that she doesn’t believe either of them felt; he wasn’t the only man in her life, nor she the only woman in his, and neither of them was the slightest bit bothered by that.  She’d always considered the idea of a serious romantic relationship with Steed a very foolish one; they were far too different, as much as she liked certain things about him.  But they had slept together regularly, and she’d always enjoyed being with him.  They’d had fun together, had taken pleasure in each other without any of the complications that sometimes marked their other ventures together.

“Your flat, I think,” she says.  And Steed smiles at her before opening the door of the car.

There’s a bit of strangeness to the whole thing, once they get back to Steed’s flat, but that’s rather natural, Cathy thinks, when it’s been more than four years.  He looks at her intently, studying her face for what feels like a long time before they even do anything.  The sex itself is more frantic than Cathy remembers, although still very pleasurable, and then he is almost tender afterwards, putting his arms around her and pressing her close.

After that, they settle into something much like what they had before.  She’s often at his flat, or he at hers; they have dinner together, whether out or in; they spend nights together, each enjoying the other’s touch.  The only difference, of course, is that Cathy no longer joins Steed in his work.  She knows that he’s still at it, and he’s mentioned that he now works with a young woman from the Ministry, but that’s really all the information she has.  She gets the sense that Steed doesn’t want to talk about it, and she knows that she doesn’t.  What they have now works because of their history—because they do know each other very well—but why shouldn’t they put the less pleasant parts of that history aside?  Now that, for the first time, it seems that he isn’t concealing an agenda from her, why talk about the times when he did?

When he says it, she’s shocked.  It’s the morning, and the two of them are lying in her bed, and his voice is quiet, conversational, when he speaks.  “Cathy…I’m afraid I’ve been seeing you under false pretenses.”

Cathy starts.  Now?  After all this?  When it’s been two months?  When she really thought that she could stop expecting trickery and manipulation?  “What sort of false pretenses, Steed?” she says, and she can hear the frost in her own voice.

Steed seems to read her thoughts, and he shakes his head quickly.  “No, nothing like that, my dear!  No, it’s got nothing to do with my work.  I meant…all this.”  His gesture encompasses the bed, their bodies, the cast-off clothes on the floor.

Now Cathy is more confused than ever.  How can they be sleeping together under false pretenses?  “You know that I don’t expect you to marry me, Steed?” she says after a moment.

He nods.  “I know.”

“You’re not married to someone else, are you?  And you’ve conveniently forgotten to mention it?”

Steed actually almost laughs.  “I’ve never had a wife, Cathy.”

“Then what on earth are you talking about?  You can’t just make a statement like that and leave it there.  Explain, Steed.”  Steed lets out a sigh.  She can’t make head or tail of this.  “Are you seeing someone else as well, Steed?  There’s nothing wrong if that’s the case, but I just wish you’d—”

He cuts her off.  “No, there isn’t someone else.  Not now.  There hasn’t been—I’d better start from the beginning.”

Cathy thought that she knew Steed well, but the story he tells her is nothing that she would have guessed.  She does know some things, though.  She knows that it is a hard story for him to tell, not something that he would share lightly.  And she knows that his words about false pretenses were true.  Cathy doesn’t require strict monogamy, but she doesn’t want to be with a man who’s in love with another woman.  And Steed is a man who’s in love with another woman.  He doesn’t tell her that, doesn’t even use the word love, but he doesn’t need to: it’s as clear as if he shouted it from the rooftops.  He is in love with the woman he tells her about; she can tell from the very way he speaks the name Emma Peel.  The fact that she is gone from his life now—that the story he tells, even though it is such a surprise to Cathy, is in some ways a very old one—doesn’t change that in the slightest.

It’s been some months since Mrs. Peel left, he tells her, but there hasn’t been anyone since then.  Not until now, at any rate.  He’s known that he can’t live forever in a memory, but it’s been rather difficult to act on that knowledge.  “But then I thought…you and I, we’re such old friends…”  His smile is rueful.  “I’ve been a pretty poor friend to you, I expect.  I’m sorry, Cathy.  This wasn’t right of me.  You’d think I’d have learned to go about things honestly by now.”

_And you’d think I’d have learned not to expect you to_ , Cathy thinks.  Perhaps she should be angry—at herself? at him?  _False pretenses_.  But when she looks at Steed, now, she is somehow not angry.  She is only very sorry.

She should get up, she decides, and she does, slipping on her robe.  “I don’t think we can do this anymore, Steed,” she says.

He nods.  “No.  I am sorry.”

“I know,” she says.  They are both quiet for another few moments, as she goes to her closet and selects clothes for the day.  “Why don’t you get dressed as well, Steed?” she says.  “We could have breakfast.”  And she suddenly finds herself smiling at that, remembering her own response many years ago, when he asked her what was for breakfast.  After this morning, she wonders if she knows him as well as she once thought she did—and yet there is certainly much that she does know.

He smiles back at her, and she wonders if he is remembering the same thing.  “Come on, get up,” she says.  “Don’t keep me waiting.”

He begins to rise.  “And you don’t think you need to be polite,” he says.  “If you’d rather I leave—”

“When have I ever thought I needed to be polite to you?” Cathy says.  “You’re being exasperating.  I’m inviting you to breakfast.”  After all, they are, as he says, such old friends. 


End file.
